“So, all of you have this problem,” Hannity said. “And the problem is people from New York, and New Jersey, and California, and Michigan, they’re leaving their states and they’re going to your states. You’re — Florida seeing a huge impact of migration out of the — out of these blue states. Now, my only fear for all of you — and I’ll let you start first, Governor DeSantis — is that they may bring their liberal policies with them.”

DeSantis said that it’s interesting that you had so many Democrats slamming Florida for being wrong about everything under the sun, especially COVID-19, and saying that New York is doing so much better than Florida when they were actually 10 times worse up north than down south. He added that people who bought into that phony narrative are likely staying up north, but he noticed those that saw through it came to Florida and registered Republican.

“And so, I think what it did is the people that buy those phony narratives for these media, they probably aren’t coming to Florida,” said DeSantis. “But most people see through it. But the people that see through it, they think like us. And so, I think a lot of these people are coming. I think they are registering as Republicans overwhelming.” ///

Maybe

Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:

In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) challenged Anthony S. Fauci over whether the U.S. government funded dangerous research in China. Here’s what they were talking about.

On Monday, President Joe Biden broke with a century of precedent by demanding the resignations of four members of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. //

Classical architecture is not a partisan issue.

President Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party, was an enthusiastic champion of the Greek Revivalism thankfully still visible in both the capital and his Monticello home. When he designed the

It severely undermines the confidence in our gun laws as well as the ATF ... if there are not criminal consequences,' Sen. Tom Cotton said. //

David Chipman, Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, refused to say during a Senate Judiciary hearing on Wednesday whether Hunter Biden should be prosecuted for an illegal firearms purchase in 2018.

According to a March report by Politico, subsequent reporting by The Federalist, and Hunter Biden’s own memoir, the president’s son appears to have lied about his drug use on an ATF form, a felony that earlier in the hearing Chipman had considered a serious crime. When Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, specifically asked the ATF nominee about the Biden son’s gun purchase, however, Chipman evaded the question.

writeofcenter
6 hours ago
What was stopped was a Trump initiative to get at the cause. This administration can't have any of that because COVID is Trumps fault. So HIS study can't be the one that shows there was actually a Wuhan Lab leak.. It must be a Biden initiated study that produces the smoking gun.

That's how it works in the Swamp.

“Can we agree that if you took President Xi Jinping and turned him upside and shook him,” Kennedy said, “The World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket?”

“I don’t think I can answer that, sir,” Fauci said laughing. Kennedy inquired, “Do you think that President Xi Jinping has undue influence over the World Health Organization?” Fauci responded, “I have no way of knowing the influence of the president of China over the WHO.”

The visual is just priceless, because it’s so accurate. Now, of course, Fauci knows it’s true. But in typical Fauci fashion, he refuses to commit on the question or put his opinion of the obvious on the record.

We know China has covered up aspects of the virus right down the line. But WHO has been right there, repeating Chinese propaganda on Jan. 14 last year claiming the virus wasn’t transmissible from person to person. As the virus then began to spread and President Donald Trump moved to cut off travel with China at the end of January, the WHO argued that wasn’t necessary because it might hurt trade and travel from China. There was also the report that Xi Jinping, told WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Jan. 21, to “hold back information about a human-to-human transmission and to delay a pandemic warning.” WHO has denied that report. Taiwan also said they warned the WHO about the virus but they were ignored. The WHO has shown over and over again there are issues.

While a decision in Google v. Oracle isn’t expected for a few months, the justices’ pointed questioning at the Big Tech giant indicates Google broke the law to get ahead. //

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Google v. Oracle on Oct. 7. The case involves several legal issues, all of which boil down to one principal question: Did Google cheat and steal its way to the top? 

While a decision on the case isn’t expected for a few months, the justices’ pointed questioning at the Big Tech giant points to the answer being a clear and resounding yes.

Some languages are better than others at preventing graduate programmers from adopting bad habits – C# and Java, for example. But Lavenne says he discourages developers from using other languages entirely. "I don't want an engineer writing in C or C++, and the reason is it's too dangerous of a language," he explains.

"There are so many potential errors they can create that modern languages like C#, TypeScript, Java, Python can prevent…We don't want them writing in those languages at all." //

Hands-on experience will always be a deciding factor – though Lavenne acknowledges that the majority of students will be lacking this by default. Instead, he suggests university courses and coding programs encourage as much project work as possible – which will at least equip them with a working knowledge of the various components of the software development cycle.

There are also a handful of specific tools and technologies that Lavenne feels that every aspiring developer should have under their belt.

"Putting an emphasis on JavaScript and TypeScript is important; Node.js is a moving force of the world right now in web technologies and others. People have to start learning TypeScript in school," he says. //

On the skillsets for languages that are super marketable; the technologies that are very marketable today are web and APIs. Every single software engineer that will come out on the market will work with APIs – they have to speak APIs, they have to speak JSON. XML is fading out into the distance; the world is speaking JSON from computer to computer, and REST APIs are everything."

Today, any application being built is going to be distributed and on the cloud. This means that deep and specific knowledge of cloud platforms is going to put a developer in good stead with potential employers.

Just add another drop in the bucket of examples on how our public school system has been invaded by hard-left radicals that wish to brainwash your children into believing racist concepts that paint America in a horrible light, this new story from the Young American’s Foundation shows an elementary school principal’s disgusting response to parents who spoke out against the critical race theory-focused education the school was forcing on their children.

The bet that StoreDot is making is that it's not the absolute charge range of an electric vehicle that matters; it's how quickly you can extend that range. So, while it's leveraging research on technologies that allow greater capacity in lithium-ion batteries, it's turning around and sacrificing some of that capacity in order to make charging faster.

Put differently, the bet is that people would rather add 300km to the range of their car in five minutes than have a car with a 600km range that takes an hour to fully charge.

As ransomware evolved, cybercriminals realized that the same network access levels they needed to plant ransomware files also lent well to exfiltrating data -- and allowed them to get around the pesky backup files that stood in between them and an immediate payday. Enter double extortion, also known as “encrypt and exfiltrate,” which extended ransomware attacks to include data breaches. In addition to encrypting victims’ files, cybercriminals also steal them, then threaten to sell or publicly release the data if the victim doesn’t pay the ransom.

During a Senate hearing on May 11, Sen. Paul grilled Fauci about NIH/NIAID funding of gain-of-function research (a/k/a “Dual-Use Research of Concern) in coronaviruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Fauci gave provably false answers to the Senator’s questions. When asked whether “the COVID-19 virus could not have occurred by serial passage in a laboratory,” though, Fauci wasn’t quite so adamant. He said:

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China.”

That raised a few eyebrows since Fauci has repeatedly said that all of the scientific evidence pointed to the virus “evolv[ing] in nature and then jumping species.”

A surprising chain of events was somehow set in motion that day, bringing us to a point where PolitiFact had to retract their own fact-checking of Tucker Carlson’s reporting on the origins of COVID-19 – based on Fauci’s comments at a PolitiFact event titled “United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking.”

But now, after the relentless reporting of sites like this one, the Wall Street Journal, as well as the persistent questions being raised about the Wuhan virus lab leak theory by prominent Republicans like Sens. Rand Paul and Tom Cotton, Facebook has suddenly and curiously done a rather dramatic about-face, telling Politico today that the ban on claims made about the possible origins of the coronavirus has been lifted:

Cristiano Lima
@viaCristiano
Scoop: Facebook will no longer remove posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made, as support mounts for probes into the virus’ origins & the Wuhan lab-leak theory https://politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053 tip @Techmeme //

As I noted in an earlier piece, what was once considered a wild conspiracy theory straight out of Wackoville is only now viewed as credible simply because Biden’s senior medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci recently opened the door to it being so – and that only happened thanks to Senators like Cotton and Paul and websites like RedState and others continuing to bang the drum well after the media and Democrats pretended the issue had been put to bed. //

But as President Trump, Cotton, Paul and other Republicans were raising red flags all last year about the possibility the virus leaked from a Wuhan, China lab, the media admittedly allowed their liberal biases to dictate what claims they treated seriously and which ones they mocked, ridiculed and supposedly “debunked.” The lab leak theory was one of them.

Because it was coming from Republicans, the approach from reporters was to treat the claim as suspect right from the start – unlike how they would have had it been made by Democrats. Journalists started out believing that the claim was false and set about proving it was rather than just simply asking questions and making determinations as to its validity after doing careful research and due diligence. And because of that it took over a year of the same Republicans and publications not backing down that got us to the point where Fauci finally said what he did and the media all of a sudden admitting for the record that the lab leak theory should be taken seriously.

Turning waste plastic into fuel isn’t a new idea. Many researchers have achieved it through a process called pyrolysis, which involves heating plastic to between 300º C and 900º C in an oxygen-free environment. This breaks the substance down into fuel, along with some additional chemicals. Hongfei Lin, associate professor with The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at WSU, thinks that he and his team have discovered a way to make the process more efficient and environmentally friendly. //

Pyrolysis is an old technology, Rollinson told Ars. It was used to make things like creosote and methanol from wood, prior to the widespread use of petrochemicals, he said. Since the 1950s, attempts have been made to use the process on plastics. So far, it has not worked out, according to Rollinson.

Though the paper says the process is high-efficiency, it’s likely not, Rollinson says, as it requires a good deal of hydrogen pressure. Reaching the necessary pressure requires a lot of energy. Making and storing hydrogen also takes a lot of energy, reducing any green benefits. He said that the experiment was only in a laboratory setting. It would require a far greater amount of hydrogen and energy to pressurize it, if introduced at a commercial scale.

Further, Rollinson noted that the catalyst and solvents used would also need to be scaled up for larger amounts of plastics. Hexane, the solvent, is toxic, explosive, and environmentally harmful if released into the wild, he added. There’s also an energy input in the process of making these chemicals. In an email to Ars, Lin acknowledged that solvent recovery and reuse would add costs, but the technology itself would work to keep costs low. All the same, Rollinson has his doubts.

“No way it’s a go-er at all,” he said. “For science’s sake, it’s quite interesting. But as a practical answer to plastic … it’s not workable.” //

RindanArs Tribunus Militumet Subscriptorreply2 days agoignore user
SharpieFiend wrote:
If we want to reduce the amount of oil that gets pumped out of the ground then something needs to be done about jet fuel - it's a major demand driver. Even if the process is less efficient than refining crude it can still be worth while.

Sure, but why "recycle"? We know how to make jet fuel. We can make fossil fuels with no problem. The Germans were doing it during World War II when they couldn't important gas, and we have surely only gotten better at the process. There is a reason why we don't do this though; it isn't worth the cost. The amount of energy you have to dump in isn't worth it. It's like using electrolysis for to get hydrogen. Yeah, you can technically do that, you just have to accept a massive loss of energy and cost. The process that we end up using for carbon neutral jet fuel is going to end up being whatever is cheapest at scale, and we are only going to use that once the cost of jet fuel rises so that it

We don't need to recycle things into jet fuel; we need a process that is scalable and the least energy intensive possible. If starting from a plastic component gets us there, great, but recycling shouldn't be the goal, just a happy side effect if that's the path that ends up being the cheapest. I'm skeptical that this is the cheapest. We are far better off to bury our plastic in the ground and then make carbon neutral jet fuel, then to spend extra energy to recycle plastic into jet fuel. Plastic in a landfill isn't hurting anyone. Using a bunch of energy on the other hand, especially with our current electricity mix, is definitely hurting someone.

Maybe I'm being too skeptical, but this seems like a gimmick to me. We don't need to recycle plastic into jet fuel, we need jet fuel, and maybe if someone can find something energetically worthwhile, a separate method of recycling plastic. It's okay if those are two independent and completely different steps, especially if it takes less energy. //

WickwickArs Legatus Legionisreply2 days agoReader Favignore user
I wish people would get off the idea that high-temperature processes must be low-efficiency. There's nothing that says one cannot have heat exchangers used to preheat products headed to the pyrolysis chamber. This isn't a combustion cycle. There's no requirement to reject heat to the environment to make it work.

The only thermodynamic limit is that the fuel probably has lower entropy than the plastic (though that's not a given). If it does, you have to invest in some amount of energy to execute that conversion.

NuScale Power and Washington State’s Grant County Public Utility District on May 26 announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to evaluate the deployment of NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) technology in Central Washington State.

Under the MOU, the two parties will work together to support Grant PUD’s due diligence process in evaluating reliable, carbon-free energy solutions. “The deployment of NuScale’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)-approved design will support meeting the demands of Grant PUD’s customers and the desired commercial operation timeline with acceptable and affordable cost certainty,” NuScale and Grant PUD said in a news release.

“This flexibility also allows for seamless integration with intermittent sources of power utilizing exceptional load following capabilities. These qualities align well with Grant PUD’s long-term objective of providing its customers with reliable, carbon-free energy and are a driving force in the initiation of the due diligence process in order to investigate the applicability of the NuScale technology in Central Washington,” NuScale and Grant PUD said.

In April, Grant PUD with Energy Northwest and X-energy signed a MOU for the development of an advanced nuclear reactor demonstration project.

The partners agreed to collaborate and share resources to evaluate the goal of siting, building, and operating an X-energy Xe-100 SMR plant at an existing Energy Northwest site north of Richland, Wash. The plant would have four 80-MW units and is scheduled to begin construction in 2024 and come online in 2027.
NuScale’s power plant design is scalable in 77 megawatts electric (MWe) increments up to 924 MWe. Modules can be added incrementally as regional load demands increase.

It’s extremely significant that Dr. Baric is saying that we need to investigate the potential of accidental release, considering how intimately he has been involved in the gain-of-function research that could have led to this pandemic. Certainly, one possibility is that scientists and our government officials (like Fauci) believed that an accidental lab leak occurred or perhaps even had evidence of such a leak, and Baric saw the writing on the wall and wanted to salvage what has been a stellar career to this point and not be thrown under the bus by Fauci. Remember, Fauci was aware that US diplomats had serious concerns about the security of the research happening in Wuhan and did nothing about it.

According to the New York Post, Vice President Joe Biden met at a dinner with Ukrainian, Russian, and Kazakhstani business associates of his son’s in a Georgetown restaurant on April 16, 2015, emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal.

An email from Vadym Pozharskyi, a Ukrainian executive at Burisma, thanked Hunter for introducing him to his father.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote on April 17, 2015.

“It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma at the time. //

So basically not only is Joe Biden a big liar when it comes to never talking about Hunter’s business, but we have to ask: Why is he lying unless there’s a lot to cover up here?

“I do think that’s another issue that has been brought to bear,” he stated. “When you deplatform the President of the United States but you let Ayatollah Khomeini talk about killing Jews, that is wrong.”

The popular Republican Governor also used a recent admission from President Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci on the Wuhan lab leak theory to make a larger point about the folly of Twitter and Facebook suspending and/or deplatforming a number of conservatives last year for suggesting as Fauci finally did earlier this month that the theory was plausible.

“Now we have information that this very well may have emanated from the Wuhan lab, that it was a leak from the lab,” DeSantis noted. “But you remember, when people last year were raising that as something that needed to be investigated, they were deplatformed for talking about the lab leak, they were censored for having said that, and now even Fauci admits that this may be something that may very well is the case.”

With that in mind, DeSantis asked rhetorically, “Are they going to now censor Fauci and pull him down off social media?”

ZippyPeanutArs Praefectusreply2 days agoignore user
If you disallow sideloading, your wrong. If you tell me I MUST get a third-party product from you and you only -- that I do not have the liberty to get it elsewhere -- then you're up to something that's no good; I don't trust you.

(Also, if you inject code into my processor's firmware that slows my processor and you don't tell me, I don't trust you.)

(Also, if you do everything in your power to prevent me from repairing my own product or prevent me from using a third-party repair shop to to fix my paid-for product -- including using your wealth and power to disrupt supply chains to those third-party shops, I don't trust you.)

(Also, if you tell me that my data is irretrievably lost and that it would be foolish to try, and a third-party tells me that it is retrievable, and it turns out to be retrievable, I don't trust you.)

(If you remove an app from your store because a repressive government pressures you to do so -- and I can't get that app from another source other than you -- I don't trust you.)

(Also, if you solder in RAM and intentionally make it impossible for me to upgrade a product I bought from you, I don't trust you.)

So, Epic might not have legal standing here, but I'd trust Roger Stone before I trusted Apple. //

bushrat011899Ars Centurionet Subscriptorreply2 days agoignore user
I think consumer devices designed to run software a user buys should allow them to load software from an arbitrary source. Consoles included. Consider 20 years from now, what if a developer wants to release a new PS4 game, but Sony has shut down digital distribution services and has stopped signing the game discs. I would argue that the ability to get software for that device is integral to its operation.

Allowing users to sideload software ensures that critical functionality is preserved for all time.

I don't care for Epic in the slightest, but one outcome of this court case improves software freedom, and the other entrenches walled gardens in legal precedent. I know which outcome I want. //

LrdDimwitArs Scholae Palatinaereply2 days agoignore user
quamquam quid loquor wrote:
How far can this case go up for appeal? My understanding is the higher it goes, the more political and broad it becomes.

I wouldn't say it's necessarily true that the higher it goes, the 'more political' it becomes. That can often happen, but isn't guaranteed.

This is a federal case. There are three levels: the district court (where the trial just ended), the appellate court, and the Supreme Court. Appealing to the appellate level is automatic; any party has the right to appeal any judgment, and the appeals court must consider the appeal (if filed properly). The appeals court is usually a panel of 3 judges from the whole court; you can petition for an 'en banc rehearing' where the whole appeals court revisits the case, but that's not automatic (and is rarely granted). After that, a party that still doesn't like the decision can ask the Supreme Court to intervene. This, too, is not automatic; the Supreme Court has the discretion to decide which cases it wants to hear, and declines most petitions.

As for 'how broad' a ruling is, rulings set precedents; the key holdings of a case are binding on future decisions involving the same issue. District court rulings basically aren't precedent at all, but can still sometimes be used for reference when there is nothing better . Appeals court rulings are binding precedent on subsequent cases in the same district (for district courts and future appellate rulings; only an en banc appeals court can overrule its own precedent). District courts are supposed to rigidly follow binding precedent. Different appeals courts can issue conflicting rulings, and thus a given situation might be handled differently depending what part of the country you're in. (This is called a circuit split, and reliably gets the Supreme Court involved to sort it out nationwide). Supreme Court rulings are binding precedent on everyone but themselves, and they make a point not to reverse course often because of the chaos that ensues.